Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings

Edited and with an introduction by ERIC O. SPRINGSTED

SIMONE WEIL

Late Philosophical Writings

Translated by ERIC O. SPRINGSTED and LAWRENCE E. SCHMIDT

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

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E-ISBN 978-0-268-09291-7

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Contents

Notes on the Texts and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Simone Weil on Philosophy

ONE. Essay on the Concept of Reading

TWO. Some Reflections on the Concept of Value: On Valéry’s Claim That Philosophy Is Poetry

THREE. Philosophy

FOUR. God in Plato

FIVE. Notes on the Concept of Character

SIX. What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?

SEVEN. The First Condition for the Work of a Free Person (Translated by Lawrence E. Schmidt)

EIGHT. Literature and Morals

NINE. The Responsibilities of Literature

TEN. At the Price of an Infinite Error: The Scientific Image, Ancient and Modern

Notes on the Texts and Acknowledgments

With the exception of What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?, which comes from the time Weil was in London in 1943, all of the texts presented here were written during her time in Marseille—September 1940 to May 1942. The texts used are the ones established and published in the Oeuvres complètes IV.1 and IV.2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2008, 2009), again excepting What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?, which comes from Écrits de Londres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). In the case of three essays, the Oeuvres complètes edition varies from earlier editions, most notably in a number of additional pages included in At the Price of an Infinite Error: The Scientific Image, Ancient and Modern, the arrangement of various paragraphs in God in Plato, and some small changes in The First Condition for the Work of a Free Person, where Weil’s original is restored after certain editorial changes had been made by the publication for which that essay was intended. This is the first English edition of these essays in their complete and corrected form.

Three essays are also translated and published in book form in English for the first time here: Essay on the Concept of Reading, Some Reflections on the Concept of Value, and Notes on the Concept of Character.

Titles in some cases have been changed from their first English translation. Human Personality is here What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?; Morality and Literature is Literature and Morals; The Responsibility of Writers is The Responsibilities of Literature; The First Condition of Non-Servile Work is The First Condition for the Work of a Free Person; Classical Science and After is At the Price of an Infinite Error: The Scientific Image, Ancient and Modern.

The translation of Some Reflections on the Concept of Value was originally published in Philosophical Investigations 37.2 (2014): 105–12, and is reprinted by permission of Wiley-Blackwell.

I would like to thank Lawrence Schmidt for his kind and gracious offer to include his translation of The First Condition for the Work of a Free Person. I would also like to thank my longtime friend and philosophical correspondent, Stephen Goldman, for his reading of several of these translations, his suggestions, and above all for the conversation that followed.

Introduction

Simone Weil on Philosophy

It can be highly misleading to separate out a complex thinker’s works too neatly into discrete subjects if one wants to understand the thinker herself. This is especially the case with somebody such as Simone Weil. Her works cover philosophy, history, social matters (such as justice, labor, and politics), mysticism, world religions, and subjects belonging to Christian theology. Valuable as these insights may be to those fields individually, there is an intellectual character to all of them that clearly shows they come from a single, and singular, mind. The insights are valuable in themselves, but the thinker transcends them. For anyone to say who Weil is as a thinker, and what she has to teach anybody, and to say it accurately, much less well, one ultimately has to take into consideration all of her work as a whole and its complex overlapping.

Still, it can be a very helpful exercise to take up the question of Weil’s thinking about philosophy as a particular subject, that is, to take up what she thought thinking is and ought to be and hence what she thought she was doing in writing all that she did. It is to take up what she thought the value of her work was and, as it turns out, what her thinking on value was.

But in treating what Weil thought philosophy is, we need to be careful about what exactly we are doing. Numerous books and articles on Weil have treated her from a philosophical point of view. But doing so can present certain problems, most generally when one fails to see where her interests and concerns go far beyond what academic philosophers normally treat. There are a number of places where this happens. Above all, to approach her in a strictly philosophical way will often completely miss—often deliberately—a genuine and central theological commitment in Simone Weil the thinker, or will miss it as a theological or religious commitment. Her Christianity, as unorthodox as it often appears, is not an addendum or a conclusion to a chain of reasoning from elsewhere. For her, there really is an act of God that takes place in Christ’s Incarnation and Crucifixion that determines the nature of the world and of human beings. This conviction was something she herself admits that she came by unexpectedly through personal experience, and not by a process of reasoning. She even goes so far as to suggest that her reason wasn’t quite sure what to do with what was indeed a certitude in her life. Yet, lest one mistake things on the other side, it also needs to be understood that this religious commitment does not make serious and unremitting philosophical reflection beside the point for Weil. Far from it. She is not just an anthology of mystical insights. So, how this commitment and philosophy go together is of the first order for understanding Weil. It is a matter of getting it right on both sides of the equation.

A second mistake occurs when one treats her as a philosopher in the sense that she is somebody who produces a philosophy. This is more than a problem of ignoring the obvious and oft-repeated fact that Weil is not a systematic thinker. Even though she is not, she is not an incoherent thinker, and what she says in one place often really does have bearing on what she says elsewhere. She thinks in a highly analogical way and finds some very startling and striking connections between otherwise disparate areas of thought. For this reason, it really is possible to provide some sort of conceptual map of the distinctive parts of her thinking. It is possible to teach somebody what significant things she has to say, and it is possible to show a person how to move from one concept to another in her thought. She is not an oracle. Rather, the mistake comes in thinking that once one has provided such a map that one has said what she was trying to do as a philosopher. For example, one might be tempted once such a map has been drawn then to compare her various positions as a philosopher with those of other philosophers. Though she has startling and discernible positions, one might be tempted to think that such positions are what she thinks philosophers ought to be coming up with, and that philosophy, as it is in the academy, is a matter of continually arguing for and against these positions. One can see where this has happened in treating Weil, even from the very beginning of the secondary literature on her. For example, Miklos Vetö, in his early and still very helpful The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, provides a way to navigate around Weil’s thinking that is quite accurate and insightful.¹ He is also quite helpful in regularly pointing out the degree to which Weil was indebted to Plato and to Kant. But Vetö also was insistent that Weil was a classical metaphysician, which is to say, he thinks that she was doing something like building a position, and that not only can one compare it to others, say, Kant, but that one intellectually ought to be doing that. But that is exactly what is at stake, at least insofar as Weil herself saw the nature of philosophy, because she did not think philosophy was that at all.

Finally, one can also make a related mistake by thinking that in uncovering her metaphysics one has uncovered the ultimate grounds for everything else she has to say, that one has somehow gotten behind what she says to find something like a theory that explains her various positions, or that somehow causes them, or that somebody else could use to build an intellectual position. Such a theory, of course, would constitute the ultimate meaning of her philosophical work, and what she has to say as a whole would then stand or fall on that. But again this is not how she thought.

So, with these caveats, it will be helpful to turn to some of Weil’s own striking comments to say what she does think philosophy is. Fortunately, we have not only suggestive isolated comments but also several essays and sets of notes from her most intellectually productive period that deal with the issue.

I

Initially, however, many of these comments, striking as they may be, do not appear very promising for development. For example, in a couple of places she posits that there are two traditions to which philosophers belong. One is the Platonic tradition, in which Weil also includes Descartes and Kant. The other, which she clearly disdains, includes Aristotle and Hegel. It is clear what in the latter tradition she wants to exclude from true philosophy. She says what it is. This is the tradition of system builders, the philosophers who construct systems in order to eliminate contradiction.² These are those, who like Aristotle, seek for God by means of human reason but who ultimately fail at the wisdom of thinkers such as Plato.³ The distinction she seems to be drawing is one between a sort of contemplative, even mystical version of philosophy and a sort of worldly rationalism. This is reinforced in her comments on method in philosophy at the opening of her London notebooks:

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

By this standard, there are few philosophers. And one can hardly even say a few.

There is no entry into the transcendent until the human faculties—intelligence, will, human love—have come up against a limit, and the human being waits at this threshold, which he can make no move to cross, without turning away and without knowing what he wants, in fixed, unwavering attention.

It is a state of extreme humiliation.

Genius is the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought. That is demonstrable.⁴

This is striking, but here it is much easier to say what Weil is against in philosophy than what she actually thinks true philosophy is. She thinks that any philosophy that is systematic to the degree that it thinks that it has an answer to everything or a universal method has missed the mark. Philosophy contemplates contradictions and the rough spots in human existence, it does not try to solve them and to smooth away difficulties. It looks, it asks, it does not prescribe. There is a general reason for this view. For, somewhat more positively, insofar as she has an eye on the transcendent, and on the search for God, it is clear that she thinks that doing philosophy like that is inadequate to its object. In part, this is because she does think the world as a whole gives evidence to a mystery that stands behind its existence and that penetrates it. This is everywhere evident in her later writings. Reason, which is a natural faculty, cannot penetrate and master this mystery, especially using language. Indeed, she is biting in pushing this point, as she does in the essay What Is Sacred in Every Human Being? (chapter 6). There she argues that what any mind can conceive is limited by the number of relations it can hold, and there is a limit to that for even the most capacious of minds, a limit that falls far short of the relations that are in the world, and of any that are beyond language. She observes: The difference between people more or less intelligent is like the difference between prisoners condemned to life in prison whose cells are more or less large. An intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a prisoner who is proud of having a big cell.⁵

What the mind needs to do therefore is to contemplate the world, and to be revealed to; thinking that one has the world down as a system fails at understanding either the world or reason itself. Even theology, which begins in revelation, fails of its object when it tries to smooth out all the wrinkles. As she argues, often with great applause, The gospel contains a conception of life, not a theology.⁶

That much is fairly clear and easily drawn out of her writings. But what is not so easy to say is what, therefore, philosophy is. She did think of philosophy very highly. But it is not at all clear yet what thinking is and it ought to be, even though it is evident that she believes that one ought to think, and to think hard and deeply. She hardly thinks of philosophy romantically, or as an exercise in irony, either.

A comparison may help in seeing what is at stake here and where she wants to go. In the Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, is trying to get at what Christianity is. His problem is like Weil’s. Philosophy, at least of the sort that the Hegelians practice, fails of its object. Dialectic is not going to get at the concept of Christianity correctly. So the task for Climacus is twofold—to show where and how dialectic fails and to show what Christianity is in such a way that one does get the concept. With respect to the first, there are a number of issues. For example, at the outset he argues that whenever dialectic is practiced objectively, then when in one’s life one acquired dialectical skill or who one’s teacher was are irrelevant to the conclusion ultimately drawn from the dialectical exercise. But that is not the case with Christianity, where the teacher and the timing in one’s life are crucial. There is something about the thinker herself, how she is situated, and the grace of the teacher that are at stake in getting the concept. Note carefully that the problem Climacus is outlining is not simply that there is an upper limit to dialectic or reason—it is not just that one is not smart enough, but if one were, then the answer would be forthcoming. With respect to the problem of what Christian faith is, the very essence of the concept has to do with the living natures of both the investigator and what she is thinking about. What is going on is a sort of understanding of the concept that requires putting it in proper context, and, in this case, this context also includes the spiritual and moral status of the inquirer. Climacus can see that much. What is beyond even him, though, is that when one has done a better job of grasping the concept of Christianity, as he has, even that falls short. Why? Because if understanding the concept fully involves the person intimately, Climacus, who is not a believer, still misses the idea by standing outside it. The full understanding of Christian faith may well be faith itself; if so, then simply seeing that it is so will only be half the game, at best—that advance may still be at the cost of what Weil called an infinite error. But at least it is an important step to see that it does involve one subjectively, and to see the importance of such things as who one’s teacher was and the proper time. To go further, though, and this is the point of the comparison, requires one to understand that something very different than dialectic is needed.

Weil does not always go down the same path with respect to that something different. Kierkegaard, for example, tended to leave philosophy itself intact and use it as a sort of servant to religious understanding, pursuing religious understanding with an entirely different kind of authorship. Weil, on the other hand, tends to blend and order the two in such a way that she sees philosophy, rightly understood, as being central to that something different. Part of that is in the distinctive way she sees philosophy. But at least where we have come to now is to have seen somewhat more of why she thinks that there is a difference between the sort of philosophy that produces views and arguments and the sort of philosophy where how one thinks is integrally involved with what one thinks, and conceptually so. That is a helpful advance. So, as far as Weil is concerned, the problem is not just one of the limits of the intellect and the largeness and the qualitative difference of transcendent subject matter. The practice and activity of philosophy is also of concern to her. The very concept of philosophy itself is at stake.

Fortunately, we do have something more than a collection of gnomic statements by Weil about philosophy, and more than just her early thesis on Descartes and the somewhat later notes taken by a student in her philosophy class in Roanne in 1933–1934, which have come down to us as Lectures on Philosophy.⁷ After fleeing Paris on the last train out before the Germans marched in, Weil spent most of the next two years in Marseille (September 1940–May 1942). This was an extremely productive and active period for her. She participated in resistance activities, regularly visited the internment camps, worked for a period in the grape harvest in the Rhone valley, and began her intense discussions about Christianity with Father Joseph-Marie Perrin. Her writings were voluminous. They included the numerous essays she wrote for Father Perrin on the ancient Greeks, in good part to convince him that they did know something of Christian truth. She continued to write on social issues. But she also became involved with the Société d’études philosophiques de Marseille, organized by Gaston Berger, who was also the editor of the Cahiers du Sud. As a result of her involvement with this group, Weil was able to concentrate a number of writings on explicit philosophical issues, including essays that dealt directly with the nature of philosophy itself, and others that were closely related. Two of them, Essay on the Concept of Reading (chapter 1) and Some Reflections on the Concept of Value (chapter 2), are of particular importance, but they have only recently been widely available. A close examination of them will help give us what Weil thought philosophy is.

II

In the Essay on the Concept of Reading, Weil seeks to define a concept that she calls reading, which is concerned with how we inescapably read meaning in the world. The phenomenon of how and where we read has a great deal of subtlety to it. For example, she notes how the world grips us through sensation: we are punched, we are burned, we double over, we jerk our hand back. The world indeed grips us and we feel it, and whatever we feel is the direct result of the world. We have no doubt about it. What Weil finds interesting is how this same sense of being gripped by the world can come about, not by the world directly impressing itself on us, but through the meanings we see in the world, in how we read the world. She gives the example of two women reading a letter. One falls down in the course of reading it; her life will never be the same afterwards. The other does not change a bit. The letter informs each of them that her son has been killed. The difference in their reactions? One knows how to read and the other doesn’t. In a similar way, Weil suggests, in our reading of the world we feel and believe that the world itself grabs us. If on a dark road, we see a man lurking behind a tree, we are afraid as soon as we see him. We have no choice in the matter. If suddenly we see that it is not a man at all, but just a branch, the fear dissolves immediately. The problem she then raises is how certain insignificant sensations, such as the black marks on a printed page that our eyes look at, can seize us as they do. In a stronger sense, the question is that we are constantly being gripped by an exterior world through the meanings that we read. Here is a contradiction, she thinks. On the one hand, what we read seizes us as if it were utterly external; our mere musings and thought experiments do not provoke the same strong reaction in us. On the other hand, we also know that these meanings somehow come from us.

It is important to pay attention to Weil’s distinction between what she is calling reading and what is simply thought. What she is not saying is that we first interpret something and then see it as that, as if there were a choice or act of will that plays a role, or as if there were some option in what we are seeing or as if we were consciously adopting a point of view. We don’t imagine it. There are, of course, plenty of occasions in which that does happen. Deliberately adopting a point of view is a frequent classroom exercise and is at the heart of teaching; it is one that takes place in assessing what a work of art might mean. But in the sort of reading that Weil is highlighting, what happens is precisely what Wittgenstein in a similar discussion, one of how aspects of things are seen by us, notes, "we interpret it and see it as we interpret it."⁸ Where this is philosophically interesting is that because there is such a sense of immediacy, and of the direct givenness of the world, we are tempted to give a realist’s imprimatur on what we read. But that would be a mistake—despite the seeming guarantee that readings come with, they do depend on us. It would, however, be just as much a mistake, and perhaps even epistemologically incoherent, to suggest that these readings are just invented or unreal. To do so is to try to permeate what appears most real, what has the most prima facie evidence for being the world’s touch, with a